Bauer does the opposite

In German, Bauer means builder, but this morning, with no notice, this international company demolished half of New Zealand's media in one fell stroke. Despite being offered wage subsidies by the Government, and being encouraged to keep going through the pandemic, they have used the Covid-19 crisis as the excuse to kill off a bundle of magazines that have been published here, some of them, for 80-90 years, and which are part of everyday life.

Some, like the NZ Woman's Weekly, deliver comfort and gossipy fun along with their recipes, royalty and showbiz tattling, and questionable fashion advice; but others, like the Listener and North & South, have been a valued source of stories about local people and investigations into issues that are important to us, if no-one else in the world. It's quality journalism, produced by small teams of extremely hard-working and talented people, dedicated to doing their bit towards meeting unforgiving publishing schedules, week after week, or month after month. And this morning, en masse via video link, they were told not, as they were expecting, that they would have to publish online only this week, but that they would not be publishing at all, ever again, from this minute.

It's not even as though these close-knit teams could extract a molecule of comfort from hearing this together, since they are all in lockdown and working from DIY workstations at home. So cruel.

The rest of us, the buyers and readers of their magazines, are in mourning too. These publications are just always there, on the newsstands in the supermarket, on the sofa, on waiting room tables, and always have been. And now? No more.

It was getting a story published in North & South that started me on my travel writing career back in 2003, and I would always have been grateful to the magazine for that, even if I hadn't later become friends with the women who produce it today. I know so many people who lost their jobs this morning, there and at the other magazines who have printed my stories: the Listener, NZWW, Next, Kia Ora, Simply You, Australian Women's Weekly.

And so, I guess, have I. I was already despondent about the travel sections of the newspapers that I write for shrinking away to virtually nothing, their advertising having dried up because of Covid-19 putting the kibosh on all travel, but was consoling myself with the thought that at least the magazines would be there. Wrong! 

So, in the wider context, now we've lost the travel industry, and most of our print media, with what remains also coughing up blood thanks to the internet's gradually poaching all the advertising that funds them. What's next?

Danke für nichts, Bauer.